Bethany Beach ice cream shop brings big city tech trends
Taylor Goebel
As long lines brim on Memorial Day's horizon, one cafe in Bethany Beach is combating it with a pocket-sized solution — a mobile ordering app.
"Even though this is a small business, we do a lot of business," said Megan Eller, co-manager of Maureen's Ice Cream and Desserts on Garfield Parkway, just a few steps from the boardwalk.
The unassuming shop, its petite white-and-red exterior reminiscent of a French bakery, "has lines out the door" in the summer, owner Hank Pilot said.
Maureen's app, available on iPhone and Samsung devices, could be a technology-forward solution that helps customers avoid those long lines and rack up rewards, similar to the convenience and loyalty points on the Starbucks app.
"Large businesses, like Starbucks, trailblazed this idea," Kathryn McMillan said in an email. "Now consumers are starting to view this as a normality and not just a singular trend."
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McMillan is director of sales for Mercantile Processing Inc., which helped create Maureen's app.
The technology provides both locals and visitors big-city convenience in a small town.
"We have a lot of people who come from Washington (D.C.), who come from New York, and this is what our customers are asking us for," co-manager Beth Eller said of the recent updates.
Maureen's Ice Cream and Desserts is in its 16th year, but Megan Eller said the shop's latest features, including the app, a TV, non-dairy ice cream and cold brew coffee made for the most change they've had in one offseason.
"(Maureen's) really can’t grow without innovation," Pilot said.
Customers can put money into the app, creating, in effect, their own coffee-and-desserts account.
Within 80 feet of Maureen's, they can order and pay on their phone, then grab their purchase at a designated pick-up spot in the store.
Ice cream lovers will have to wait in line to order (since Maureen's can't sustain the cold treat ahead of time), but they can still pay on their app and collect loyalty points.
Those rewards amount to 25 points for every 25 cents, a no-fuss calculation for the not so math-inclined. And anyone who downloads the app gets a free kid's cone.
Customers can also order online.
Small businesses like Maureen's are starting to trend toward technologies that help enhance operations, McMillan said.
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Maureen's implemented the point of sales system a few years ago, something a "small, coastal business in rural Delaware 10 years ago would not have been able to access" without a great expense, she added.
Pilot's wife, Maureen, died in 2014 after stage four breast cancer. She opened the Bethany shop in 2002 with the idea of combining coffee and ice cream.
Pilot said Maureen would have wanted the shop to grow.
Non-dairy Cherry Garcia and fudge brownie ice cream and cold brew coffee (a 24-hour brewed, exceptionally smooth drink) promise to uphold Maureen's vision in 2018, a time when veganism, technology and now-mainstay caffeine trends grow into the mass market.
Eller said they might start selling edible cookie dough as well, which could affect the app's success: Such a decadent, childhood treat may just increase those lines after all.